Nancy Pelosi is finished

 

Nancy Pelosi is finished

no one deserves more blame for Dems’ $1B electoral collapse

Under her ruthless leadership, her party lost the White House, the House, the Senate and the popular vote.

Miranda Devine, New York Post

It’s high time to shatter the myth of Nancy Pelosi as a master strategist. Nobody deserves more blame than the ridiculously self-titled "speaker emerita" for the Democrats’ $1 billion electoral collapse. 

Under her ruthless leadership, her party lost the White House, the House, the Senate and the popular vote. You can’t say that enough. 

Voters rejected the Dems from coast to coast, even in Pelosi’s deepest-blue home city of San Francisco, which saw a 7-point swing to Donald Trump.

She’s the only speaker in history to have lost control of the House twice. 

She’s finished

The empress emeritus has no clothes (perish the thought). 

Yet she still has the nerve to reward herself with another term, filing the papers last week to run for re-election in 2026, at the tender age of 86! She’ll be 88 at the end of Trump’s term.

When is too much enough?

Her saccharine-coated "Mean Girls" style of partisan viciousness and deviousness turns out to have done nothing for her party but postpone the inevitable reckoning between the radical left and common-sense moderates. Unfortunately for the Dems, most of the latter have taken a hike under Pelosi’s reign. 

Lying and infighting

If the GOP is Trump’s party, the Democratic Party is Pelosi’s — and what a viper’s nest of blame-shifting and rancor it has become, as they all blame each other for their humiliating defeat at the hands of the man they derided as a Nazi. Most Americans didn’t agree, and now the Democrats and their media handmaidens stand exposed as frauds and liars.

If Trump is such an "existential threat" to democracy, as Pelosi insisted to the bitter end, why did Joe Biden greet him with open arms and a beaming smile the other day? 

"Welcome back," said the president to the man Pelosi vowed would never again enter the White House.

"I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity," she told the Guardian before the election when she was trying to justify the coup against Biden, her former longtime friend who, she kept lying, was "sharp as a tack" until he fell apart on live TV.

With her party in ruins, pent-up frustration with Pelosi’s iron grip and flawed judgment is starting to find voice. Expect it to get louder as her efforts to offload blame on Biden leave a sour taste in the mouths of party loyalists. 

Since the humiliating defeat, Pelosi has been filmed publicly squabbling with Donna Brazile, has traded barbs with Bernie Sanders and has been ripped on "The View" and MSNBC. The Washington Post fact-checker even awarded her "Four Pinocchios" for lying that illegal migration was worse under Trump than Biden.

"The View" co-host Ana Navarro called Pelosi "nasty" for telling the New York Times that the Dems would have won if Biden had quit sooner. 

"She wants to make sure people know it wasn’t her, [that] she has no blame in this. … It’s really unseemly." 

Symone Sanders Townsend, MSNBC host and former Biden aide, blasted Pelosi for helping "orchestrate the very public demise of the president."

"Nancy Pelosi, everybody talks about how the speaker emerita, you know, she’s so strategic, she can count, she did all of that when she was the speaker in Congress, but my question is: Where is your calculator now?" 

Anonymous Dem lawmakers vented their spleen to Axios last week. 

"She needs to take a seat," one senior Democrat said of Pelosi. "Making scattershot comments [blaming others] is not just unhelpful, it’s damaging."

"[House Minority Leader] Hakeem [Jeffries] has been tremendously graceful and respectful of her, but I don’t think she is being respectful of him," said another Dem, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

'She's the enforcer'

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) wasn’t afraid to go on the record to express his frustration at Pelosi’s toxic legacy.

"She embraced this ‘She’s the Godmother, she’s the enforcer’ [image] and now she’s blaming Biden," he told Politico last week. "Well, you can’t have it both ways. You got what you wanted, and now you’re still blaming Biden.

"I think it’s really ironic that you have a woman at age 84 and she is still hanging on. Why not give a younger generation an opportunity to occupy that seat?"

Why not indeed. The only reason she’s hanging around Congress is the same reason she demanded her successor as speaker, Jeffries, bestow on her the "emerita" title: her ego. 

She believes she is the only person capable of crippling Trump’s second presidency like she did his first, and she is addicted to the adulation of a lapdog press overly impressed with the fact that she is female. They even praised her classless, divisive stunt of ripping up Trump’s State of the Union speech in 2020, standing right behind him at the podium for all the world to see.

In her two decades of amoral, divisive leadership, the Democrats have become the party of censorship, scolds, war and corporate interests. 

She devoted the twilight years of her career to her obsession with destroying Trump and his supporters, whom she slyly set up on Jan. 6, 2021, by refusing to give Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund the National Guard backup he begged for, and then turned the Jan. 6 committee into her personal star chamber.

Despot times

All her hatred, the impeachments and lawfare and jailing of Trump allies, served neither her party nor the country. Trump is back, better than ever, her party is in ruins and the country has been through hell for four years.

At the DNC convention that anointed Kamala Harris as their doomed presidential candidate, Dems were seen sporting buttons featuring Pelosi and the word "Godmother" with her face on a poster for the iconic Mafia movie "The Godfather." If that’s not an admission that she still runs the party like a Mafia don, nothing is.

It is true that she is a formidable leader in the Genghis Khan mold, as one GOP semi-admirer describes her. But what good were her dictatorial skills to the party she led off a cliff? 

She needs to ride off into the sunset, for everyone’s sake.

Miranda Devine is a writer, New York Post columnist and Fox News contributor.

Restoring Deterrence Will Prevent Endless Wars

 

Restoring Deterrence Will Prevent Endless Wars

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness

On January 3, 2020, the Trump administration conducted a drone strike near Baghdad International Airport, killing Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani.

Soleimani had a long record of waging surrogate wars against Americans, especially during the Iraq conflict and its aftermath.

After the Trump cancellation of the Iran Deal, followed by U.S. sanctions, Soleimani reportedly stepped up violence against regional American bases—most of which Trump himself ironically wished to remove.

A few days later, Iran staged a performance-art retaliatory strike against Americans in Iraq and Syria, assuming Trump had no desire for a wider Middle East war.

So, Iran launched 12 missiles that hit two U.S. airbases in Iraq. Supposedly, Tehran had warned the Trump administration of the impending attacks that killed no Americans. Later reports, however, suggested that some Americans suffered concussions, while more damage was done to the bases than was initially disclosed.

Nonetheless, this Iranian interlude seemed to reflect Trump’s agenda of avoiding “endless wars” in the Middle East while restoring deterrence that prevented, not prompted, full-scale conflicts.

Yet in a second Trump administration, rethreading the deterrence needle without getting into major wars may become far more challenging. The world of today is far more dangerous than when Trump left in 2021.

An inept Biden administration has utterly destroyed U.S. deterrence abroad through both actual and symbolic disasters: the Chinese dressing down of U.S. diplomats in Anchorage; the humiliating skedaddle from Afghanistan; the brazen flight of a Chinese spy balloon across the U.S.; the invasion of Ukraine by Russia; the October 7, 2023 massacre of 1200 Israelis; the serial Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea; the visible restraint of Israeli from fully replying to Iranian missile attacks on its homeland; and renewed bellicosity on the part of both North Korea and China toward American allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Of course, a second-term Trump must radically reform the Pentagon and beef up the military while warning enemies of the consequences to follow from any unwise aggression.

But if opponents believe such admonitions remain only vocal threats, then empty verbiage surely will erode deterrence further—such as Joe Biden’s serial and empty braggadocio, “Don’t!”

Biden’s past theatrical finger-shaking translated into aggressors like Putin going into Ukraine, Iran sending missiles into Israel, and the Houthis serially hitting shipping in the Red Sea.

Given the past messes of the Iraqi, Libyan, and Syrian interventions, and the catastrophic Biden humiliation in Afghanistan, Trump in 2024 is much more emphatic about the need to avoid such overseas dead-end entanglements or even the gratuitous use of force that historically can sometimes lead to tit-for-tat entanglements.

Still, Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as vice president, along with Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Jr., and Tucker Carlson as close advisors, coupled with the announcements that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and prior UN Ambassador Nikki Haley will not be in the administration, may be misinterpreted by scheming foreign adversaries as proof of Trump neo-isolationism.

Moreover, the U.S. is battered by an unsustainable $37 trillion national debt and a nonexistent southern border that saw 12 million illegal aliens enter with impunity.

So, the use of force abroad is now often seen in a zero-sum fashion as coming at the expense of unaddressed American needs at home.

Moreover, a woke, manpower-short military has not achieved strategic advantages from wars abroad, while disparaging and alienating the very working-class recruits who disproportionately fight and die in them.

Recently, even as President-elect Trump’s inner circle emphasized an end to endless conflicts, Trump warned Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin not to escalate his attacks against Ukraine. Yet that advice was followed by a Russian massive drone onslaught against civilian Ukrainian targets.

Putin no doubt wishes to encourage American enemies to test Trump’s deterrent rhetoric against his campaign’s domestic promises to mind America’s own business at home.

Is there a way to square the deterrence circle?

Trump will have to speak clearly and softly while carrying a club. And for the first few months of his administration, he will be tested as never before to make it clear to Iran and its terrorist surrogates, China, North Korea, and Russia that aggression against US interests will be swiftly and quietly met with disproportionate and overwhelming repercussions.

Yet Trump will likely have to rely on drones, missiles, and air strikes and not on major engagements, to deter enemies from aggression—and his domestic critics from claiming he turned into a globalist interventionist.

He is not.

Trump remains a Jacksonian. But such deterrence entails warning from time to time the reckless and adventurous abroad that our allies have no better friend than America and our adversaries no worse enemy.

In other words, Trump must remind Americans only by periodically deterring enemies can he prevent endless wars.

 

What the Hegseth nomination means

 What the Hegseth nomination means

Byron York,Washington Examiner 

WHAT THE HEGSETH NOMINATION MEANS. On Tuesday evening, President-elect Donald Trump shook up Washington by announcing that he would nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. “Pete is a graduate of Princeton University and has a graduate degree from Harvard University,” Trump said in the announcement. “He is an Army combat veteran who did tours in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan. For his actions on the battlefield, he was decorated with two Bronze Stars.” During his years as co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, Hegseth has focused extensively on military and veterans affairs. This year, he wrote a bestselling book, War on Warriors, in which he decried the new woke military.*

“The military has long been a place for turning mere boys into fighting men not just by teaching them honor and sacrifice but by channeling daring, building strength, and accumulating skills,” Hegseth wrote. “The so-called elites directing the military today aren’t just lowering standards and focusing on the wrong enemy; they are overtly working to rid the military of this specific (essential) type of young patriot. They believe power is bad, merit is unfair, ideology is more important than industriousness, white people are yesterday, and safety! is better than risk-taking.”

The nomination immediately set off an outcry. “Who the f*** is this guy?” said an anonymous defense industry lobbyist quoted in Politico. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who did not serve in the military and chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on personnel, wrote on X: “A Fox & Friends weekend co-host is not qualified to be the Secretary of Defense. … I respect every one of our servicemembers. Donald Trump’s pick will make us less safe and must be rejected.” A liberal veterans advocate called Hegseth “undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history.”

The fact is that despite his impressive qualifications — Princeton, Harvard, two Bronze Stars, and professional success — Hegseth does not have the resume one would expect from a secretary of defense, most notably the management experience to run one of the largest bureaucracies in the world, with an $841 billion budget this year. But Trump clearly wanted a change in direction. 

Trump can look at past secretaries who had the right resumes and didn’t work out. Bill Clinton picked a Democratic member of the House named Les Aspin, who had decades of experience overseeing the Pentagon and turned out to be a terrible secretary of defense. George W. Bush picked Donald Rumsfeld, who had vast experience in government and had even been defense secretary before, and Rumsfeld made grievous errors in the job. Barack Obama had problems with the Pentagon, and Trump himself struggled to find the right man to run the Department of Defense, going through five secretaries or acting secretaries in the first Trump administration.

Most of all, Trump wants a Defense Department that can get things done without all the wokeness and HR department stuff that plagues modern bureaucracies. Trump has an old-movie view of the U.S. military and American generals — he frequently praises this or that general or other leader as being “straight out of central casting.” Above all, he wants military leaders who will accomplish missions rather than explain why those missions cannot be accomplished, which has been a common desire of presidents for a very long time. There is a story Trump tells that illustrates what he has in mind.

In a speech last February to the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, Trump told the story of escalating the campaign to destroy the Islamic State. As he usually does, Trump got around to the subject somewhat elliptically. His discussion started with the U.S.-Mexico border and his action forcing Mexico to accept his Remain in Mexico policy. Then, Trump moved to the idea of U.S. policymakers preventing soldiers and law enforcement, such as those at the border, from doing their jobs. Then, he moved on to the people he called “television generals,” such as Gen. Mark Milley, whom Trump called “an idiot.”

Then, Trump moved on to heap elaborate praise on U.S. military men and women. The pilots on Air Force One, he said, were “better looking than Tom Cruise — and taller.” The generals were “really great,” with the exception of Milley and other “TV generals.” And then, there was Air Force Gen. J. Daniel “Razin” Caine, the man who “knocked the s*** out of ISIS.” Trump described being told by his Washington-based military advisers that it just wasn’t possible to eradicate ISIS quickly. It could take years. Progress would be incremental. But then, in December 2018, Trump flew into Iraq on a secret presidential visit, where he met Caine.

Trump went into great detail about the flight, in which the pilots used extensive safety maneuvers, no lights, steep corkscrew approach, and other stealth techniques, to land the plane in a dangerous area. First, it blew Trump’s mind that the United States has spent 20 years and trillions of dollars in the Middle East “and we can’t land a plane with the lights on.” What kind of success is that? Trump described going to the cockpit of Air Force One in darkness to watch the pilots. Trump became more and more anxious as the plane dove toward the airport in the middle of the night. Onstage, he started doing a little Rodney Dangerfield nervous sweating routine — “Does anybody have a towel?” — and then mockingly suggested he should award himself the Medal of Honor for his courage in riding along with the landing. (As he usually does, Trump then said the press would probably report that he said it seriously, and indeed, some did.)

Then, Trump described walking down the steps of Air Force One and meeting Caine. Trump did a little double-take comedy on Caine’s nickname and described him as looking “better than any movie actor you could get” and “the man I’m looking for” to take down ISIS. Trump said he asked Caine, “Why is ISIS so tough?” and Caine answered, “They’re not tough, sir — they just don’t let us do our job.” Trump asked how long it would take for the military to destroy ISIS if Pentagon leadership freed them to get the job done. A few weeks, Caine said, according to Trump. And that is what happened. Even if parts of Trump’s story are apocryphal, the fact is that the U.S. military quickly “knocked the s*** out of ISIS,” in Trump’s words.

The lesson Trump took from that is that the military is great but that U.S. military leadership is sclerotic, risk-averse, and overly politicized. “We have a great military, and it’s only woke at the top,” Trump told CPAC. “I don’t think it could ever be ‘woke-enized’ at the lower levels because these are great people. It was only at the top.”

So now, Trump is proposing a radical change at the top of the civilian leadership of the military. It could be a breakthrough success, rebalancing the military as a fighting force above all else. Or it could be a failure, and everyone will be asking what Trump was thinking when he put Pete Hegseth in charge of an $841 billion bureaucracy. But if voters sent any message in the election, it is that they want a change from the Biden administration and that they approve, in a big-picture sense, of Trump’s leadership in his first time in office. So now, Trump is, as promised, bringing change.

“All the criticism of him is that he’s not the expected Washington pick, and I’m just saying to you that the American people just voted against the expected Washington pick,” CNN resident conservative Scott Jennings said Tuesday night. Yes, Hegseth will have to run the confirmation gauntlet in the Senate, Jennings continued, and will have to show that he has the knowledge to do that job. “But we ought to give this man a chance, in my opinion.” That’s what the election was about.

IT’S TIME FOR HIM TO GO

 

The end of the Obamaification of American politics? 

IT’S TIME FOR HIM TO GO

Scott Johnson, Powerline 

David Samuels and David Garrow explored “The Obama factor” in the classic 2023 Tablet column/discussion. Commenting on Obama’s post-presidential residence in Washington, D.C., Samuels observed:

[I]it was clear to any informed observer that the Obamas’ continuing presence in the nation’s capital was not purely a personal matter. To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms. The fact that these were not normal times could be adduced by even a passing glance at the front pages of the country’s daily newspapers, which were filled with claims that the 2016 election had been “stolen” by Russia and that Trump was a Russian agent.

Samuels returns to the subject of Obama’s refusal to depart the scene in last week’s post-election UnHerd column “How Trump crushed Obama’s legacy.” Both of these excellent columns deserve the closest attention.

Washington Examiner editor Hugo Gordon adds this: “It’s eight years since he ended his second presidential term. Yet he lingers like a bad smell. Why is he still here? Because despite his elegance of manner he doesn’t have the grace to get out of the way. He won’t allow others to rise to meet the challenges of today, so Democrats stay as radical as a Chicago South Side community organizer.”

All true, but there is more to that bad odor. Neither Samuels nor Gurdon has had the opportunity to take in the transcript of Remarks by the President in Roundtable with Progressive Journalists (January 17, 2017). “The President” was of course Obama. Although released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2022, it was only posted publicly in recent days. Park MacDougald brought it to my attention last week with this comment:

On four occasions in the conversation, he seeded the Trump-Russia collusion narrative among the journalists, despite knowing that it was a false piece of Clinton campaign propaganda. As usual, Obama spoke in innuendos, rather than directly, but the point of his briefing was clear. He blamed Trump’s victory on the Clinton campaign and the media for not reporting enough on “the Russia leaks.” He stated that “the Russia thing” was a “problem” with the incoming administration and said it’s “hard to know what conversations the President-elect may be having offline with business leaders in other countries who are also connected to leaders of other countries.” That’s an apparent reference to the discredited Alfa Bank conspiracy theory, shopped first to the CIA and then the press by Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman, which held that Trump was secretly communicating with Putin through the servers of a bank. Obama suggested that Trump was receiving indirect payouts from Vladimir Putin through Russian nationals purchasing apartments in his buildings….All this, again, about a piece of Clinton campaign opposition that Obama himself knew was false.

As we saw in the closing days of the Harris campaign, President Obama remains a poisonous blight on our national discourse. As was once said of Al Gore, now it can be said of Obama. It’s time for him to go.

A Modest Proposal

 

A Modest Proposal 

Don Jaffa, LCMB member

Who can forget the ‘hanging Chad’ of the ‘Bush-Gore’ election cycle? Or, the news media deleted references to the Antrim County Superior Court ordered Forensic examination of the voting machines, and the finding that they were vulnerable to hacking. Or the Maricopa County pause at 11pm when Trump was ahead by 9,000 votes to 8am resumption where Biden was ahead by 9,000 votes. And affirmed by the County. 

As Ronald Reagan said to Gorbachev, “Trust but Verify!” So we are faced with the brick wall of paper ballots and paper absentee ballots. Both of which are set in stone by progressive “woke” politicians because (despite their claims otherwise) they can be manipulated in different ways. They will not surrender any opportunity to steal elections.  

In 1946, in ‘The Battle of Athens,” WW II veterans refused to accept a rigged local election, and took action to seize the ballots and report the true election results, that threw out a corrupt sherif. It was the veterans who took the initiative in face of corruption.  

At present, our national media has become challenged as the presenter of ‘Fake News,’ and therefore completely untrustworthy. It is time to put Ronald Reagan’s “Verify” in place.  So how, one might ask, can our electoral process be secured, and foster integrity and respect in that process. 

Biannual and quadrennial elections for the House, Senate and the Presidency are the purpose of federal elections. They are also concurrent with local and state elections as well. There is only one organization with the technical competence and ability, to do this task. It is the National Security Agency. It may require a constitutional amendment to set the process under the NSA. 

The NSA, using super computing, can set up a national voter registration data base. The data base is set up using ZIP+4, State DMV driver/ID registration, and the social security number. Each federal and state agency will provide an update every 30 days so the data base remains current.  

For any registration, in every state, with DMV, for either a driver’s license, or personal identification, an applicant will have to provide an American birth certificate, and provide a thumbprint.  

Each state will be provided with USB memory sticks, loaded with an access to the ballot. At 60 days prior to an election those who request absentee ballots can be sent one of these USB memory sticks to cast their ballot. Every polling station will be provided with voting booths equipped with an access to the internet using one of these USB memory sticks.  

When a voter clicks on ‘Open Ballot’ the software opens an NSA generated VPN using either 128 or 256 byte encryption VPN that connects only with the NSA electoral data base. The voter has to type in his or her ZIP+4, their Driver license number, and then their SSN. That opens the ballot for them to vote. When the ballot is voted, it activates the attached thumbprint reader. When the thumbprint is scanned and the light turns from red to green, the vote is cast.   

So what protects the integrity of this electoral process? First of all, the use of the thumbprint reader secures the requirement that only the thumb of the voter insures the veracity of the identity of the voter. Now, the issuance of the social security number takes place at birth, in the hospital. Much earlier it was obtained when one first wanted to work. 

The current VPN encryption uses 128 bytes, which is the AES standard. With current technology, experts believe it is ‘unhackable’ through the rest of this century. It can be upgraded to 256 byte encryption AES standard. That upgrade makes it even more difficult to ‘hack.’  

But that ‘hack’ would only afford access to a ‘ballot’ on election day, or the early voting period. A ‘Hacker’ would not be able to cast a vote. During setup of the system each state DMV would upload their DL/ID data base, and every 30 days upload new registrations or renewals, and deaths, invalidating a registration. The same process takes place with the social security system, i.e., a complete upload during setup, and every 30 days upload new registrations, or deaths. NSA would also report dual registration of social security numbers as a felony violation of the federal law enacting the security and integrity of the federal electoral process.  

The federal and state criminal justice systems would also have to report those incarcerated for felony convictions and the end date for incarceration, as their right to vote is suspended during incarceration and during probation. At the completion of probation or incarceration they would only have to submit a writ of restoration with the nearest federal district court. The tech nerds argue that Quantum computing can easily hack any of these systems using VPN, or into state DMV or the federal social security system. We already have to worry about either the Russian or Communist Chinese governments. They are the only ones that can acquire the Quantum computing assets and the interest to interfere in US federal elections. On the other hand, the US government can set up a separate internet only for federal elections, with no access to the regular internet, with only terminals at US post offices, or polling stations. 

A Media Beyond Caricature

A Media Beyond Caricature

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

CBS’s iconic 60 Minutes has had plenty of scandals and embarrassments in its long 57-year history, most notably the fake-but-accurate Dan Rather mess. Yet never has it found itself in greater disrepute than in 2024.

Donald Trump, for good reason, recently declined to join 60 Minutes for its traditional election-year in-depth interviews of the two presidential candidates. Why?More

Last time he consented in 2020, anchor and interviewer Leslie Stahl attacked Trump’s accurate assertion that the Hunter Biden laptop (then in the possession of the FBI) was authentic—and authentically damning to Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy.

Stahl falsely claimed the laptop “can’t be verified.” She further incorrectly asserted, “So this story about Hunter and his laptop, some repair shop found it; the source is Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.” The New York Post, in fact, reported the story. The FBI did not deny it.

Yet old Twitter and Facebook, under collaborating FBI tutelage and pressure, suppressed dissemination of the truth. Joe Biden’s then-advisor and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in conjunction with former interim CIA Director Michael Morrel, helped round up “51 former intelligence authorities” (among them Leon Panetta and both John Brennan and James Clapper, who had admitted previously of lying under oath to Congress) to claim falsely that the laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian information gambit to warp the election.

Joe Biden used the “expert” consensus to further lie in the last Biden-Trump debate that the laptop was cooked up by the Russians. And neither CBS, the “intelligence authorities,” nor any of the Bidens have ever since apologized.

More recently, CBS got caught selectively editing the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, cutting and pasting an incoherent Harris response to lessen her embarrassing word salad. And in a subsequent interview with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the network once again edited and pruned his answers, but in contrast, on this occasion, to make him seem far less persuasive.

In yet another current CBS interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, network host Tony Dokoupil honestly questioned Coates about his new, one-sided, anti-Israeli book The Message. The result was that the left-wing icon Coates was almost immediately revealed to be abjectly ignorant of the Middle East, unapologetically biased, and completely uninterested in any viewpoint other than his own partisan prejudices.

Yet what followed proved yet another network embarrassment. An internal CBS division with the eerie Orwellian title of “CBS News Race and Culture Unit” attacked Dokoupil for not providing “context” for Coates’s self-condemnatory and embarrassing interview. The subtext was that CBS, under pressure from woke zealots, simply disowned Dokoupil and sought to subject him to correct thought training. His apparent crime was not insisting on different—softball—journalistic standards for woke black authors like Coates. In other words, CBS blamed Dokoupil for revealing Coates to be a fool on the air.

The network further diminished its eroding reputation yet again through the unprofessional conduct of recent moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan during the J.D. Vance/Tim Walz vice presidential debate.

After the earlier ABC-sponsored debate between presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, in which the moderators became partisan fact-checkers (and often wrongly so) of Trump alone and drilled him on follow-up questions in a way not accorded Harris, CBS promised not to repeat such a network embarrassment. So, it pledged not to fact-check the two vice presidential candidates and instead to present a “fair” moderation of the event.

Instead, the CBS moderators were even more patently one-sided than the prior disastrous ABC performance. The two broke their own pre-debate rules by indeed fact-checking. But, even worse, they fact-checked Vance alone. And, once again, did so erroneously in a way that only exposed their unprofessional partiality.

Given the prior ABC debate sham, CBS was supposedly determined not to turn off the public with more moderator partisan distortions. Instead, the network proved that if it was a question of further eroding its professional brand or helping elect the Harris/Walz progressive ticket, then CBS would predictably choose to jettison its reputation to further the progressive cause.

Just as CBS is no longer the network television standard, so too has the current generation of partisans done their best to sully the New York Times. Within just a few days, the Times embarrassed itself in ways similar to the partisanship so toxic at CBS.

The Times just published an op-ed, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza.” What followed were testimonials from medical officials and doctors in Gaza with truly harrowing stories of Israel’s collateral damage and the shooting of civilians, accompanied by X-ray photos of small children with IDF bullets allegedly lodged in their bodies and heads.

But even if one was not aware of the fables promulgated by Hamas and the history of propagandistic attacks on Israel, and even if there was no corroboration of how the victims died and under what conditions, a novice might have sensed that something was not quite right with the evidentiary X-rays.

Experts pointed out that the embedded bullets in the scans appeared pristine, without any fragmentation after entering skulls or midriff sections. There were no apparent entry and exit wounds on the images—suggesting either that it was unlikely the bullets came from IDF-issued high-velocity weapons or that the X-rays might simply have been rephotographed with IDF bullets placed beneath them. In any case, the New York Times did not cite any expert outside reviewer to authenticate the scans.

Recently, the New York Times again rushed to partisan judgment to persuade the public that current charges of abject plagiarism by presidential candidate Vice President Harris were baseless. Accusations arose that Harris and her coauthor in a past book on crime had plagiarized a number of sources multiple times.

Yet the Times claimed the copying was minor and did not rise to the level of actionable plagiarism. It “proved” this by quoting a plagiarism “expert,” Jonathan Bailey, who, it implied, had consulted all the alleged plagiarism passages.

But once the public saw just a few of the passages in question, almost immediately it concluded otherwise: that Harris and her co-author were indeed plagiarists. That forced Bailey, the original Times expert, to reconsider his initial opinion: “At the time, I was unaware of a full dossier with additional allegations, which led some to accuse the New York Times of withholding that information from me. However, the article clearly stated that it was my ‘initial reaction’ to those allegations, not a complete analysis.”

Bailey then concluded that Harris had indeed committed plagiarism but not “maliciously” so. Once again, the Times had not verified its assertions before publication, and once again it had erred on the side of its known partisanship.

The Times and CBS are just a small example of current once-prestige outlets—such as ABC (cf. its moderators during the Harris-Trump presidential debate) and NPR (that just retracted its scurrilous charges against journalist Rich Lowry)—who have consistently abused the public’s trust for the partisan benefit of progressives or their causes.

In sum, the trust and prestige that took prior generations of journalists decades to earn have been thrown away in just a few years by incompetents and partisans—on the ancient, flawed principle that the supposedly superior moral ends justify any means necessary to achieve them.

We Are in Need of Renaissance People

 We Are in Need of Renaissance People

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, The Blade of Perseus 

The songwriter, actor, country/western singer, musician, U.S. Army veteran, helicopter pilot, accomplished rugby player and boxer, Rhodes scholar, Pomona College and University of Oxford degreed, and summa cum laude literature graduate, Kris Kristofferson, recently died at 88.

Americans may have known him best for writing smash hits like “Me and Bobby McGee” and “For the Good Times,” his wide-ranging, star-acting roles in A Star is Born and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, his numerous solo albums, especially with then-spouse and singer Rita Coolidge, and the country group super-quartet he formed with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson.

In other words, Kristofferson was a rare Renaissance man who could do it all in an age of increasingly narrow specialization and expertise.

At certain times throughout history at particular locales, we have seen such singular people from all walks of life.

Classical Athens produced polymaths like Aristotle—tutor to Alexander the Great, logician, student of music, art, and literature, educator, think-tank founder, biologist, philosopher, and scientist. Later Greeks like Archimedes and Ptolemy, as men of action, mastered six or seven disciplines and applied their abstract knowledge in ways that made life easier for those around them.

The late Roman Republic was another cauldron of multitalented geniuses. It produced the brilliant stylist, historian, politician, and consummate general Julius Caesar, as well as his republican archrival Cicero—politician, philosopher, orator, master stylist, lawyer, and provincial governor.

Turn-of-the-century Victorian Great Britain produced giants like Winston Churchill—prime minister, statesman, essayist, historian, orator, strategist, and wartime veteran. As Britain’s war leader, between May 10, 1940, and June 22, 1941, he, almost alone, resisted the Axis powers and prevented Adolf Hitler from winning the war.

But we associate the idea of a “Renaissance man” mostly with Florence, Italy, between the 15th and 16thcenturies. In that brief 100 years, the Florentine Republic hosted multi-talented geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci—master painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, engineer, and inventor—best known for the Mona Lisa and Last Supper.

The multifaceted talents of his younger contemporary Michelangelo were as astounding, whether defined by his iconic sculptures David and Pietà, his stunning painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or as the master architect of the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica.

The American Revolution was a similar embryo of Renaissance men. Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the most famous example of unchecked abstract and pragmatic genius displayed in almost every facet of late 18th– and early 19th-century life—main author of the Declaration of Independence, third U.S. President, founder of the University of Virginia, inventor, agronomist, architect, and diplomat.

But Benjamin Franklin may best approximate the model of the Florentine Renaissance holistic brilliance—journalist, publisher, printer, author, politician, diplomat, inventor, scientist, and philosopher.

Franklin’s life was one of perpetual motion and achievement. In one lifetime, he helped to draft the Constitution, invented everything from the lightning rod to bifocals, founded the American postal service, and successfully won over European countries to the nascent American cause. Theodore Roosevelt—president, historian, essayist, conservationist, naturalist combat veteran, battle leader, explorer, and cowboy—exemplified the idea of an American president as the master at almost everything else.

The history of our own contemporary Renaissance people often suggests that they are not fully appreciated until after their deaths—especially in the post-World War II era.

Why?

We have created a sophisticated modern society that is so compartmentalized by “professionals” and the credentialed that those who excel simultaneously in several disciplines are often castigated for “amateurism,” “spreading themselves too thinly,” “not staying in their lanes,” or not being degreed with the proper prerequisite letters—BA, BS, MA, PhD, MD, JD, or MBA—in the various fields that they master.

But specialization is the enemy of genius, as is the tyranny of credentialism.

Because the Renaissance figure is not perfect in every discipline he masters, we damn him for too much breadth and not enough depth—a dabbler rather than an expert—failing to realize that his successes in most genres he masters and redefines is precisely because he brings a vast corpus of unique insights and experience to his work that narrower specialists lack. The Greek poet Archilochus first delineated the contrast between the fox who “knows many things” and the hedgehog who “knows one—one big thing.” We have become a nation of elite hedgehogs, whose narrow expertise is not enriched by awareness of or interest in the wider human experience.

Renaissance people often live controversial lives and receive 360-degree incoming criticism, not surprising given the many fields in which they upstage specialists and question experts—and the sometimes overweening nature of their personalities that feel no reason to place boundaries and lanes on their geniuses and behavior or to temper their exuberances.

The best American example of the current age is the controversial Elon Musk, a truly Renaissance figure who has revolutionized at least half a dozen entire fields.

No one prior had broken the Big Three auto monopoly of GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

Musk did just that. He exploded all three companies’ dominance with his successful creation of the first viable electric vehicle, Tesla, whose comfort, drivability, reliability, safety, and power rivaled or exceeded the models of all his competitors.

His spin-off battery storage and solar panel companies allowed thousands of families to go off the grid and stay self-sufficient in power usage.

Musk’s revolutionary Starlink internet system—a mere five years old—provides global online service to over 100 countries. Through its some 7,000 satellites, Starlink brings internet service to remote residents far more effectively and cheaply than do their own governments. When natural disasters overwhelm utilities or war disrupts the normality of peace, all look to Musk to restore online reconnections to the outside world.

Musk, almost singlehandedly, transformed the U.S. space program from a NASA 60-year-old government monopoly to an arena of fervent private-public competition. His Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) created a rocket and spacecraft program that has kept the U.S. preeminent in space exploration and reliable satellite launches. When NASA and old aerospace companies falter, the government looks to Musk to bail them out.

Musk, at great personal cost, radically transformed the old Twitter—poorly managed, censorious of ideas and expressions not deemed progressive, and mired in scandal for partnering with the FBI to silence news deemed possibly injurious to Democratic candidates and left-wing campaigns.

His new X replacement is an unfettered platform for free expression. And the more the left abhors their loss of the monopolistic old Twitter’s ideological clearing house, and vows to flee X and start their own new left-wing, censorious Twitters, the more they stay on X.

Musk’s newest companies have now entered the convoluted, little-understood, radically competitive, and dangerous field of artificial intelligence (OpenAI) and the emerging discipline of bonding the natural brain to the electronic online world (Neuralink). To the degree Musk is successful, America will lead these areas of intense international rivalry that involve the gravest issues of national security and survival.

Overspecialization has helped make vulnerable and sometimes doomed complex top-down societies from the Mycenaeans to the Aztecs to the Soviets. A tiny credentialed and often incestuous elite manages the lives of a vast underclass whose daily lives are scripted by top-down master planners—as an autonomous and skeptical middle class disappears.

America is increasingly becoming a bifurcated, two-tiered society of a specialized government-corporate-media-political-credentialed class of degreed overseers and managers who attempt to micromanage an increasingly less well-educated, dependent underclass.

The overclass cult lacks sufficient common sense and pragmatic expertise outside their narrow areas of specialization to direct society, and the masses are often without the education, money, and power to challenge them or the esoteric complexity of their modern society. And the result is often disastrous, as we see everywhere, from the trivial to the existential—from our currently paralyzed state space station program and inability to build a floating pier in Gaza, to ineffectual and insensitive state responses to natural disasters like Hurricane Helene and an increasingly dangerously incompetent Secret Service.

Renaissance people provide a link to the proverbial people, as they master almost anything they attempt while keeping themselves attuned to the practical effect of their achievement among the people.

The Renaissance physicist Richard Feynman once explained to the entire nation why the Space Shuttle 1986 Challenger catastrophically imploded shortly after launch. A polymath Albert Einstein explained to America why it had to begin the Manhattan Project and beat Nazi Germany to the acquisition of an atomic bomb. Theodore Roosevelt used his expertise as a politician, conservationist, outdoorsman, explorer, and writer to help establish and preserve 230 million acres of public lands.

So, we should occasionally pause and reflect on the Kristoffersons and Musks in our midst. They play a vital role in enriching culture and civilization for the many without becoming part of the narrow few. And we owe these people, who belong to a rare and hallowed caste of the ages, for making our lives richer, more enjoyable, easier, and safer.

 

We Lose Total Control

 

“We Lose Total Control”

Clinton Continues Her Censorship Campaign on CNN

Jonathan Turley, jonathantruley,org

Hillary Clinton is continuing her global efforts to get countries, including the United States, to crackdown on opposing views. Clinton went on CNN to lament the continued resistance to censorship and to call upon Congress to limit free speech. In pushing her latest book, “Something Lost and Something Gained,” Clinton amplified on her warnings about the dangers of free speech. What is clear is that the gain of greater power for leaders like Clinton would be the loss of free speech for ordinary citizens. 

Clinton heralded the growing anti-free speech movement and noted that “there are people who are championing it, but it’s been a long and difficult road to getting anything done.” She is right, of course. As I discuss in my book, the challenge for anti-free speech champions like Clinton is that it is not easy to convince a free people to give up their freedom.

That is why figures like Clinton are going “old school” and turning to government or corporations to simply crackdown on citizens. One of the lowest moments came after Elon Musk bought Twitter on a pledge to restore free speech protections, Clinton called upon European officials to force Elon Musk to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). This is a former democratic presidential nominee calling upon Europeans to force the censorship of Americans.

She was joined recently by another former democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, who called for government crackdowns on free speech.

Other democrats have praised Brazil for banning X. For her part, Clinton praised the anti-free speech efforts in California and New York and called for the rest of the country to replicate the approach of those states.

Clinton added a particularly illuminating line that said the quiet part out loud. This is all about power and the fear that she and others will “lose control” over speech:

“Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control and it’s not just the social and psychological effects it’s real harm, it’s child porn and threats of violence, things that are terribly dangerous.”

Clinton continues to offer a textbook example of the anti-free speech narrative. While seeking sweeping censorship for anything deemed disinformation, Clinton cites specific examples that are already barred under federal law like child porn.

Despite the amplified message on sites like CNN, most citizens may not be as aggrieved as Clinton that she and her allies could “lose total control” over the Internet. The greater fear is that she and her allies could regain control of social media. The Internet is the single greatest invention for free speech since the printing press. That is precisely why figures like Clinton are panicked over the inability to control it.

If citizens remain true to their values and this indispensable right, Clinton will hopefully continue to face “a long and difficult road to getting anything done” in limiting the free speech of her fellow citizens.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

Blow Up the Middle East War

 

How To Blow Up the Middle East War in Five Easy Steps

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

When Joe Biden became president, the Middle East was calm. Now it is in the midst of a multifront war.

So quiet was the inheritance from the prior Trump administration that nearly three years later, on September 29, 2023—and just eight days before the October 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis—Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan could still brag that “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

So, what exactly happened to the inherited calm that led to the current nonstop chaos of the present?

In a word, theocratic Iran—the nexus of almost all current Middle East terrorism and conflict—was unleashed by Team Biden after having been neutered by the Trump administration.

The Biden-Harris administration adopted a 5-step revisionist protocol that appeased and encouraged Iran and its terrorist surrogates Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

The result was a near guarantee that something akin to the October 7 massacres would inevitably follow—along with a subsequent year of violence that has now engulfed the Middle East.

First, on the 2020 campaign trail, Biden damned long-time American ally Saudi Arabia as a “pariah.”

He overturned the policies of both the previous Obama and Trump administrations by siding with the Iranian-supplied terrorist Houthis in their war on Saudi Arabia.

Biden accused the kingdom of war crimes, warning it would “be held accountable” for its actions in Yemen. Biden-Harris took the murderous Houthis off the U.S. terrorist list.

Almost immediately followed continuous Houthi attacks on international shipping, Israel, and U.S. warships—rendering the Red Sea, the entryway to the Suez Canal, de facto closed to international maritime transit.

Worse still, by the time of the 2022 midterms, when spiraling gas prices threatened Democratic congressional majorities, Biden opportunistically flipped and implored Saudi Arabia to pump more oil to lower world prices before the November election. Appearing obnoxious and then obsequious to an old Middle East ally is a prescription for regional chaos.

Second, Biden-Harris nihilistically killed off the Trump administration’s “Abraham Accords.” That diplomatic breakthrough had proven a successful blueprint for moderate Arab nations to seek détente with Israel, ending decades of hostilities to unite against the common Middle East threat of Iran.

Third, Biden begged Iran to reenter the appeasing, so-called Iran Deal that virtually had ensured that Iran would eventually get the bomb.

Worse yet, it dropped oil sanctions against the theocracy, allowing a near-destitute Iran to recoup $100 billion in profits. And it greenlighted $6 billion in hostage ransoms to Tehran.

An enriched Tehran immediately sent billions of dollars in support and weapons to the anti-Western terrorists of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis to attack Israel, Americans, and international shipping. Iran soon began partnering with China and Russia to form a new anti-American axis.

Biden-Harris also fled abruptly from Afghanistan, abandoning billions in weapons and American contractors. The humiliation thus virtually destroyed American deterrence in the Middle East, inciting enemies and endangering friends.

Fourth, Biden-Harris restored hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the West Bank and Gaza, but without any guarantees that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas would desist from their past serial terrorist acts.

In the case of Hamas, U.S. and Western “humanitarian aid” simply freed up more fungible dollars in Gaza to arm Hamas and to expand its subterranean tunnel complex essential to its October 7 massacres and hostage-taking.

Fifth, from the outset of the ensuing increased tensions, Biden-Harris began pressuring the Israelis to act “proportionally” in responding to the massacre of some 1,200 Israelis and nearly 20,000 missiles, rockets, and drones launched at their homeland from Iran, the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

Such straitjacketing of our closest Middle East friend further signaled the Iranian-backed terrorists that there was now “daylight” between the U.S. and its closest regional ally. That opportunity provided still further incentives for Iran to test just how far it could safely go in attacking Israel.

But why did Biden-Harris so foolishly ignite the Middle East?

In part, the administration naively tried to resurrect the old, discredited Obama administration notion of ‘creative tension’—of empowering a rogue Iran and its terrorists to play off Israel and the moderate Arab regimes, as a new sort of balance of power in the region.

In part, Biden-Harris was caving to increased anti-Semitism at home and the rise of powerful, pro-Palestinian groups on U.S. campuses and in critical swing Electoral College states.

In part, Biden-Harris was naïve and gullible. The two bought into the anti-Americanism and anti-Israel boilerplate of our enemies. So, they thought to make amends by seeing Iran and its terrorists as the moral equivalent of democratic, pro-American Israel.

Their malignant legacy is the current Middle East disaster.

Lawless Border Catastrophe by Kamala Harris

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